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This paper examines the effect of the global financial crisis on corporate investment in Korea. Specifically, the crisis was considered to have possibly constrained firm-level investment as the negative shock to the credit supply dramatically unfolded. As Duchin et al. (2010) demonstrated, if a negative supply-side shock is evident during a crisis period, larger cash holdings before the crisis will lead to fewer constraints to corporate investment, or vice versa. In order to investigate the supply-side effect of the crisis, we use firm-level financial data, including firms listed on the Korean stock market as well as small and medium-sized enterprises. We find that corporate investment declined significantly after the crisis, even if we control for factors associated with the demand side, such as contemporaneous capital productivity and cash flow. More importantly, the decline is positively and significantly related to cash holdings before the crisis, implying the negative effect of a credit supply shock. Small and medium enterprises experienced relatively sharp investment declines compared to those of larger firms, and the relationship between pre-crisis cash amounts and the degree of investment decline is greater than that in large firms. Additionally, we examine whether the negative effect persists up to the present, finding evidence that the cash-investment relationship continues in small and medium-sized enterprises.

During the global financial turmoil in 2007-2008, deviation from the covered interest parity (CIP) between the Korean won and US dollar through the foreign exchange swap has escalated in its magnitude beyond 1,000bp in November 2008, and it still persists around 100bp level. In this paper, we examine a newly developed margin based asset pricing model using Kalman filter approach and show that the escalation of the CIP deviation is found to be significantly related to the global dollar funding illiquidity and country-specific funding conditions. Furthermore, we find evidence that the poor funding conditions (or higher margins) are driven by the general money market illiquidity and may lead to higher funding illiquidity, which suggests the reinforcing effects of the liquidity spiral. We also show that the supply of dollar liquidity and improved funding conditions help alleviate the deviations from the parity, however the persistent anomaly is found to be related to the high level of volatility in the FX swap market.